


My Girl Claudine

by Leelo_Forever



Category: Fullmetal Alchemist - All Media Types, Fullmetal Alchemist: Brotherhood & Manga
Genre: Character Study, F/M, Introspection, Mustang's Team, One Shot, Quiet, Team Bonding, mustang is cheeky, nobody is actually named claudine, riza gets introspective
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-10-27
Updated: 2020-10-27
Packaged: 2021-03-08 17:27:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,289
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27220468
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Leelo_Forever/pseuds/Leelo_Forever
Summary: On a night out with the team, Riza's attempts to avoid dwelling on today's date are almost working.
Relationships: Riza Hawkeye & Roy Mustang, Riza Hawkeye & Team Mustang, Riza Hawkeye/Roy Mustang, Roy Mustang & Team Mustang
Comments: 12
Kudos: 60





	My Girl Claudine

**Author's Note:**

> This is my first fic in this fandom, and truthfully, my first fic in a long while. I hope you like it! I am so late to the FMA game.

Of all the nights for rain.

Riza looks down into her glass while manning the booth where their coats are stacked, boots up on the bench. The window behind her is foggy with humidity, and the droplets of rain glow yellow from the gas lamps outside. She thinks the pub must look cozy from the street, and runs her fingers through the condensation. 

The panes of glass begin to rattle in their frames and Riza turns to the thudding that shakes the entire pub -- tumblers, plates, and cutlery clang with each stomp, dust rising from the wooden floorboards at the feet of Mustang, Breda, and Havoc. 

“Stay on beat!” shouts the Colonel while watching their feet, one arm in the air, the other slung over Breda's shoulders, with Havoc at the end of the line. The patrons begin to clap to the rhythm of their footfalls and she watches as the Colonel looks up and around, smiling and glassy eyed, shirtsleeves rolled, jacket discarded, and collar askew, crushed under Breda’s forearm. All three are breathless and rosy cheeked, grinning through their concentration. 

“Louder!” he yells at the pub’s revelers, laughing as men begin to bang on the tables and stomp their feet from their seats. They are all going to be in sorry shape in the morning. 

“Kain!” yells Havoc, reaching to grab Fuery as the merry half-circle passes him coming back from the bar. “Kick, Fuery, kick up!” goads Breda, and Havoc envelops the smaller man under his arm. Breda’s pink cheeks and open collar make him look years younger under the warm light of the pub. “Falman, Lieutenant -- come on!” 

While Riza has gotten up to watch and is clutching her glass with a smile on her face, there is no way in hell she is joining them. Instead, she raises her drink to the boys and downs it in one gulp, feeling a crack in her glacier of worrisome thoughts as warmth blooms inside of her. With her team's roar of approval, she suddenly finds it hard to fault them for getting piss drunk on a Wednesday, their whoops and hollers a balm for her burning memories. The little half circle marches towards her, the Colonel snatching Falman from his perch and Havoc, of course, beginning to sing as they envelop Riza with their drunken revelry, trapping her in a tangle of arms and sweat. 

_“Oh I once did know a maiden fair--_

“Jean! Not this one!” she says, swiping at him. 

_“With big doe eyes and long blonde hair --_

“Guys! Come on! Kain! Really? Colonel?” 

_“The fiercest in the land, my girl Claudine!”_

“Here we go…”

_“She ran so wild, She ran so free_

_Oh what’d she’d even do to me?_

_If I told her I had made her sister sing.”_

_“When I asked of her to keep me warm,_

_She cocked her gun and called the storm_

_She set me in her sights, my girl Claudine! "_

Kain’s glasses have fogged up and she has to stop herself from wiping them off for him. Riza simmers in this feeling for a moment longer, eyes flicking from one comrade to another. She knows her face is red and she doesn’t know where to look but their singing is louder than the rain battering the windows and that’s all that matters now. Two warm hands grab her wrists, tugging her forwards until she is face to face with the Colonel, Breda and Falman singing on either side of him. She thinks they look a bit like two extra heads growing out of his shoulders and her face collapses with laughter at the sight of them, bangs dripping, faces flushed, inches from hers.

“You should see yourselves right now!” she yells over the patrons stomping and clapping along to their song.   
  


_“All I wanted was her golden head,_

_Hair spread and lovely on my bed_

_But she’d sooner see me dead, my girl Claudine!”_

Ever the dramatic, the Colonel brings her hands together and clasps them against his chest. His heart is beating rapidly with exertion and he feels warm and sturdy beneath her. Riza grasps at his shirt, fingers curling in protest above his heart as she pulls him forward to speak into his ear over the din of the pub.

“I’m armed, you know,” she says, and makes a show of pretending to set herself free, but he only holds her hands tighter against him as he sings. Riza rolls her eyes and gives them all a long-suffering smile. Tomorrow will undoubtedly be a disaster at Eastern Command, but she feels grateful for the state they're all in tonight. It’s easier this way, she thinks, as she follows a droplet of sweat down the Colonel’s throat. It disappears into his open shirt’s collar and she shoots her gaze back up to his face. His smile has grown even wider, the bastard. He leans forward, his grasp on her hands slick. 

_“She swore she’d see me warm and fed_

_then pumped my belly full of lead!_

_That lovely girl, my golden Queen_

_Claudine!”_

The men break apart laughing and clapping, Falman and Fuery sliding into the booth and finagling with the pitcher of water. She snatches her hands back and scans the remaining soggy singers, tossing a couple of cloth napkins at Mustang and Breda as Havoc makes for the bar. 

“Thanks, Sir,” grins Heymans, while Mustang only wipes his brow with his bare hand and flicks it her way.

“Colonel!!!” she starts while he swings his head back and laughs, grabbing a glass of water from Fuery behind her and moving to sit. 

Havoc brings over a couple pitchers of beer for their last round with the look of someone who _maybe_ placed it all on Mustang’s tab. It isn’t long before Riza is stretching her legs, feeling for her uniform jacket and coat -- searching for a glove that had undoubtedly fallen by their feet. She feels grateful the night had passed without incident, shushing the part of her that almost wishes it didn’t. The guys began to slowly unfurl themselves from their drunken stupor and cigarette smoke at her restlessness to leave. 

“Don’t go yet,” says the Colonel, hand on her elbow. He stands up to face her and he looks like he could sleep for years if he ever let himself rest. Riza gives him a pointed look and throws her overcoat and glove his way so she can shrug on her uniform jacket. 

“Oh come on!” he goads, arms full. “We’re celebrating! 

She plucks the glove from his hands. “We are not; _you_ all just happened to get drunk.”

“No,” he says, with some measure of seriousness behind his smile. “I really am.”

“Really drunk?” she sighs. She hopes she's wrong about where the Colonel is going with this. 

“Don’t you want to know?”

That crazy part of her brain that sometimes wants her to jerk the steering wheel into oncoming traffic is telling her to just go ahead and bring it up, but the moment passes and she feels sane again. 

“Well whatever it is,” she says, brushing him off, “It's getting late. I should go.” 

He looks patient, amused even. “Alright,” he replies, stepping back and handing her the coat. She can feel him watching her as she gathers her things from the booth, yanking her scarf out from under Breda and snatching the second glove from the windowsill, bundling everything up under her arm. His hands are on his hips now, and he regards her with an expression on his face she can’t place. 

“Don’t make that face Sir, I’ll see you tomorrow.” 

She turns to the rest of the team, all of them in various states of drunkenness, and waves goodbye. Falman manages a wave while Havoc toasts to her but the rest give her tired nods. 

“See?” she whispers back at the Colonel. “Even they’re tired.”   
  
“Let me walk you out.”

They take shelter under the pub’s small awning, and he plucks her coat out of her arms and helps her in, chuckling. 

“What?” she says as she shrugs into her coat. “You’re being so-- 

“And you’re acting like you don’t know.” 

There it was.

She takes her scarf from his hands in silence, attempting to ignore the small smile on his face. He continues, unbothered. 

“I’d give you a commemorative demonstration, but I’m quite useless in the rain, as you’ve said.”

The thought occurs to her then, that he probably thinks about it each year -- just the same as she does. Does he, too, see a glow around the day on his calendar, in his mind when it slinks forward and the days fall away from the week? 

“Hard to believe it’s been a decade, I suppose,” she concedes. 

Riza will give him that. And that’s it. 

“This time of night ten years ago to the day,” he sighs, pausing. “We were probably having tea by the fire. Me scribbling in that book. You pretending not to be cold.” 

The Colonel runs his hand up her shoulder, moving her hair forward over her collarbone. “It feels like I could reach backwards in time and touch them both.” 

Riza sees them too. 

She is on her side, stretched out in front of the hearth with a blanket and a cup of tea. Her nose is warm and toasty; her bare back stings from the cold. The pitter patter of rain is constant and heavy upon the aging house, and she wonders how much longer it would take Mr. Mustang to crack the code. Two more days? Three? Riza feels his breath on her neck sometimes, the ghost of his fingertips along a shoulder blade. This time, they flutter at her lower back as the blanket’s edge carefully slides forward to reveal the rest of the array. The fabric falls away, sliding across her stomach to pool at the floor in front of her navel while she holds the top of it against her chest. She can still feel the ground digging into her forearm and hip. That night is the first time she has ever pondered the curve of her own bare waist before.

Riza remembers being abuzz with the knowledge that they were really doing something, that this was the first step in changing the awful world they lived in. She dreamt about how Riza the Adult would save people -- girls and boys with wells of sadness like hers, so black no light could enter nor escape. 

What fools they had been, the night they had found the fire together. 

She places a hand on his forearm. “Sir...Colonel.”

“Would you stop them, if you could, Lieutenant?” 

She sighs and her breath curls into itself against the light and the cold. It frightens her sometimes, how similar their thinking has become. 

“Of course not.”

“You hesitated.”

“Only because I had been asking myself the same thing all night.”

His shoulders sag -- is it relief? Is it disappointment? He loved punishing himself, that one. Not that he doesn’t deserve it -- they both do. Riza looks over her shoulder, making sure no one is around, then quickly wraps her arms around him. His shirt is cold and damp, and she feels his arms snake around her and his own hands tangle in her loose hair. The Colonel chuckles and it reverberates through her many layers; she feels it in her throat. 

“I trusted you then,” she says, into his shoulder. “I trust you now. Even if I could stop them, we still would have made the same mistakes down the line. They’d just look different, sir.” 

She goes to separate herself but he holds her tighter and they stay like that for a moment longer. The rain feels peaceful now; the man in front of her is just the boy who wrote her letters with dogs doodled in the margins, who always added sticks of cinnamon to her tea. 

“I have one more question for you.” 

“Go ahead then," she offers, and he speaks quietly, right into her ear. 

“So you wouldn’t change a _single_ thing, huh?”

She freezes for a moment, caught off guard, then punches his shoulder with respectable force. He yelps and pretends to be more wounded than he has a right to be for a big bad state alchemist.

There are just some things they don't talk about, can't talk about -- ever. Or at least, yet. Yet. 

“Easy now Claudine, don’t shoot.” 

“Don’t _tease_ me!”

“I'm not! It's -- I'm not. Sorry.” he says, sucking in his breath and clutching his shoulder. "How could I ever tease you about that?"

Maybe she had hit him harder than she meant to. He winces again, but it peters off into laughter. 

“Call me Mr. Mustang one more time, for old time’s sake.”

She rolls her eyes and wraps her scarf around her. “Don’t start making requests now, we’ll be here all night.”

“I wouldn't mind.” His eyes are bright, even in the dark and the rain. 

She regards him for a second longer, and feels a smile brewing on her face. But they had already waded too much into the past, and she fears the current could overtake them. 

“I’m going home, Sir. I’ll see you tomorrow. Have a drink of water when you go back inside.” 

Riza had made it to the end of the street before she heard a “Goodnight Miss Hawkeye!” 

And then, a chorus of voices in teasing sing-song:

“ _Good-night Miss Hawk-eye_!" She shook her head as she walked on, hearing wet thuds, muffled laughter, and then-- “get back inside before I court martial all of you.” 

_“Oh he once did know a maiden fair!”_

“Jean.” 

“ _With big doe eyes and long blonde_ OUCH!”

  
  


**Author's Note:**

> Thank you =) 
> 
> I'd love to connect with you on Tumblr! I'm @LeeloForever.


End file.
